Blog Archives
Square Enix Announces “Dive In” Mobile Cloud Gaming Service
Move over, Sony. You’re not the only ones who want a piece of the cloud gaming market. Square Enix is getting into cloud gaming but is cutting out the pesky console middle man. This fall, Square Enix will be launching a service in Japan that will let you stream games to your Android or iOS device called Dive In.
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EA Says Dungeon Keeper Mobile “Innovated Too Much”
In June, EA CEO Andrew Wilson referred to the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper as “a shame.” In doing so, he seemed to be admitting that EA had made a mistake with their approach to bringing the cult classic to the mobile gaming space as a free-to-play game.
Don’t tell that to EA Mobile boss Frank Gibeau. He didn’t think that the failure of Dungeon Keeper Mobile was a result of the monetization model. Instead, in an interview with Games Industry, Gibeau said that Dungeon Keeper Mobile “innovated too much or tried some different things that people just weren’t ready for.”
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Amazon Goes Full Mobile with the Fire Phone
It’s been rumoured to be coming for years but we’ve never actually seen the long discussed Facebook phone. However, the far less hyped Amazon phone is actually a reality. On Wednesday, Amazon through their hat into the increasingly crowded smartphone ring with the new Amazon Fire Phone.
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New Facebook App Feature Activates Your Phone’s Mic When You Post
Just when you thought that Facebook had reached the height of privacy invading evil, they find a new trick to make you think that they may be worse than the NSA. A recent Facebook mobile app update includes a hidden little feature that activates your phones microphone when you’re writing a post, listens to what’s going on the room and includes what you’re up to in your post.
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Report: iPhone 6 to Come in Two Sizes, Both Bigger than the iPhone 5S
I hope you didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on the iPhone 5S thinking that is was going to be the be all and end all of iPhones. Only six months after the release of the latest iPhone, reports have come out about the upcoming bigger and better iPhone 6.
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King Crushes CandySwipe In Ongoing Candy Trademark Saga
Last month, it came to light that King, the makers behind the wildly popular Candy Crush Saga mobile game, had filed trademark applications on the words “candy” and “saga.” Not only are they trying to trademark common as dirt words, they were trying to enforce their trademarks by going after other games, including the not at all similar The Banner Saga game by Stoic Studio.
At the end of January, King CEO Riccardo Zacconi issued an open letter saying that King wasn’t intent on eliminating any and all competition using their trademarks. Instead, King said that their trademark policy “is to protect our IP and to also respect the IP of others.”
Unfortunately, that isn’t how it’s actually working in real life. King is using loopholes in trademark law as part of a legal battle with CandySwipe, a game that preceded Candy Crush Saga by two years, and outspend developer Albert Ransom out of the mobile app business.
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Flappy Bird Taken Down by Creator
After becoming one of the biggest app creators in the mobile gaming world in the span of about two weeks, Flappy Bird creator, Dong Nguyen, says that he’s done with his famous creation. Over the weekend, Nguyen pulled the game from the iTunes and Google Play stores.
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Critics Corner: Dungeon Keeper (Mobile)
No, I’m not letting this go. I’m not sure what the worst thing about the free-to-play mobile edition of Dungeon Keeper is. The denigration of a much heralded franchise for a quick buck is pretty bad. The fact that the game isn’t so much free-to-play as it is fee-to-play with microtransactions that are hardly “micro” isn’t any better. Maybe it’s the fact that the game is likened to Clash of Clans in Dungeon Keeper clothing after we talked about King ripping off and being ripped off by other games.
The 2014 mobile game purporting to be Dungeon Keeper might not be the worst free-to-play mobile game ever made. It may not even be the worst free-to-play mobile game released in the last couple of months. Dungeon Keeper represents much more than itself. It shows how broken the mobile market is. Whether it was called Dungeon Keeper or Crypt Master or Confrontation of Demons, it would still be an abomination of a game when it’s not there to entertain but to panhandle.
But enough of what I think. Let’s see what the critics have to say.
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It’s Not Free-to-Play but Mobile Gaming That Is Broken
The big story in the games news world right now is EA’s mobile release of Dungeon Keeper. The original Dungeon Keeper was released in 1997 and was an instant cult hit. Gamers loved it and game designers were influenced by it. Even today, Dungeon Keeper is often among the top sellers on GOG.com.
The mobile version of Dungeon Keeper pretends to pay homage to the cult classic and instead bastardizes it with the worst free-to-play microtransactions system that many people have seen. While we’re used to free-to-play cash grabs, this might be the most blatant attempt to stop gameplay at every possible turn to squeeze the player for more money.
I don’t think, however, that the problems with Dungeon Keeper Mobile aren’t a result of the free-to-play model. If you go looking for free-to-play games, not all of them are blatant cash grabs. However, when you look at it more closely, you find that so-called games designed to print are really a mobile gaming problem.
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NVIDIA Unveils 192-Core Tegra K1 Processor
Just when you thought that your smartphone had the latest and greatest tech, NVIDIA has set the bar for mobile processors even higher. Just one year after unveiling the Tegra 4 processor, NVIDIA has unveiled something more akin to a next-generation mobile processor rather than a little increase in horsepower with the Tegra K1.
et geekera 